Editor's Note: All translations are from the translation feature on Tako. I've added some links and done some minor cleanup where it felt appropriate. Enjoy!

Mable Jiang: Hello everyone, I am today’s AMA host Mable. I have already introduced myself in the thread that invited @vitalik.eth so I won’t take up more public space. We have 2 minutes to officially start today’s AMA!

Before we start, I would like to briefly introduce today's rules:

1. Starting at 12pm UTC, I will start posting questions, and I will link each question to @vitalik.eth so that he can find it. If he finds a question difficult to answer, he will directly state it.

2. Vitalik’s way of answering is to “quote recast” the original question post, and when posting, he will choose the circle “Flash Q&A Circle”.

3. All the questions I ask will be in Chinese + English. You can use English or Chinese directly to see Vitalik's reply, depending on whether the content is more technical. Tako app has a translation function, you can use it directly.

4. After the interview begins, I hope everyone will try not to send additional questions to disrupt the information flow, but everyone is welcome to reply under his reply post.

Finally, please be polite in your communication. If there is a serious disrespectful reply, the group owner has the right to block this person from the group (for completely self-hosted information, we cannot delete it, we can only curate it). Thank you for your attention!

Vitalik Buterin: Hello everyone!

Mable: The first question I’d like to ask is one that’s been discussed many times before, but I still believe it’s very important in Feb 2025.

In your view, should today's Ethereum be something closer to Bitcoin, or should it be more akin to a “World Computer”?

You mentioned in a previous post on X that many people who hold negative views about ETH are merely short-term speculators frustrated by their own losses, providing almost no constructive help to the Ethereum community. However, even within the OG ETH-Maxi camp, many strongly advocate the idea that “ETH is money” (for example, Bankless, the largest ETH Maxi media outlet), comparing ETH directly to BTC and arguing that it’s another competitive form of digital currency—perhaps even a superior one.

What is the ultimate narrative you envision for ETH when it comes to its future adoption?

Vitalik: I think these two ways of thinking are compatible with each other.

If you need to tell which blockchains are “truly decentralized”, you can use a relatively simple test: if its foundation disappears, can the chain survive? I feel that only Bitcoin and Ethereum can clearly answer: of course. Most of Ethereum’s development is outside the foundation, and the client teams have an independent business model. Now many researchers are not in the foundation, and almost all activities except Devcon are independent.

Getting to this stage is hard. Ethereum wasn’t like this 5 years ago.

Giving up these advantages in pursuit of TPS is a big mistake, because there will always be new chains that suddenly have higher TPS than you. But decentralization and resilience are precious, and few blockchains have them.

These characteristics are conducive to making a digital currency with long-term value, and also conducive to having a good world computer. However, the world computer also needs to solve the problem of expansion. "World computer" does not mean "a computer that can support every application in the world at the same time", but "a place where applications in the world can interoperate with each other". High-performance computing can be placed in L2, which is fine. However, this excellence still requires L1 to have enough scale. For specific details, you can see an article I wrote recently: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/02/14/l1scaling.html

ETH is a digital asset suitable for use by the world's applications (including finance, and other things like ENS, etc.). ETH does not need every transaction to be placed on L1, but it needs to have enough throughput to allow anyone who wants to use L1 to use it at least occasionally.

So these two directions are also compatible here: the characteristics that help Ethereum become a better world computer are also the characteristics that make ETH a better digital currency.

Mable: By now, a large number of Layer 2 solutions have emerged, primarily those built on the OP stack, as well as some ZK rollup attempts. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the rollup roadmap [EN: See Vitalik's original A rollup-centric ethereum roadmap post from 2020] over the past few years, hopefully in as objective a retrospective as possible:

1. What do you think has been done well, and in what ways have things turned out differently from your original expectations?

2. Overall, are rollups a good thing for Ethereum, or are they "parasitic" (I noticed you recently called on these L2s to give back to Ethereum)?

3. Does ETH really need these Layer 2 solutions?

Vitalik: So far, our expansion method can be roughly understood as hybrid L1 + L2, but I think no one has clearly defined which transactions should be on L1 and which transactions should be on L2.

"Put everything on L2" is a difficult answer to accept because:

• This makes it easy to lose ETH's position as a medium of exchange, store of value, etc. If you are worried that L2 will steal L1 users and not give L1 anything in return, this problem will be more serious in a situation where "L1 does almost nothing"

• Cross-L2 operations still require L1. If an L2 fails, users still need a way to move to another L2. So there are some use cases that are difficult to avoid L1. I wrote an article on this topic here: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/02/14/l1scaling.html

"Put everything on L1" is also a difficult answer to accept because:

• If L1 supports many transactions, it is easy to become centralized, even if ZK-EVM and other technologies are used

• The world’s demand for on-chain transactions is infinite. No matter how high L1’s TPS is, you can always find an application that requires 10 times more TPS (e.g., artificial intelligence, micropayments, micro-prediction markets, etc.)

• L2 not only provides capacity expansion, but also provides faster confirmation speed through preconfirmations and avoids MEV problems through sequencers

So we need hybrid L1 + L2. I think the role of L2 will continue to change, for example, it seems that evm-equivalent L2 is enough now, it is possible that we will see more privacy-focused L2 (aztec, intmax, etc.), there may be more application-specific L2 (if an application wants to control its own MEV situation, there are benefits here, etc.)

So in the short term, I think we should continue to improve the capabilities of L1, increase blobs to give L2 more space, and promote cross-L2 interoperability. Then the market will decide which expansion method is suitable for which application.

Mable: The rollup approach has been proposed for quite some time. Do you think the single sequencers currently used by Arbitrum, Base, and Optimistic Rollup present a significant regulatory challenge in the future, given that they aren't really censorship-resistant? Do you believe they will move toward a decentralized sequencer model?

If your answer to the previous question is positive, what are your thoughts on MegaETH’s centralized sequencer solution?

Vitalik: Centralized sequencers actually have many advantages:

• A centralized sequencer can ensure that it will not steal users’ money by frontrunning, etc.

• instant preconfirmations

• It is easy to turn a traditional application into a blockchain application because the server directly becomes a sequencer

The decentralized nature of blockchain can be used to avoid the risks of centralized sequencers: forced inclusion mechanisms prevent sequencers from censoring users, and optimistic or zk proof mechanisms prevent sequencers from changing or violating application rules (for example, suddenly inflating a token or NFT collection).

However, centralized sequencers still have risks, so we cannot rely solely on centralized sequencers to solve the problem. It is also important to have the ability to trade based on rollup or directly on L1. So I support the two-part ecosystem to promote these two methods at the same time, and then we can see which method is more suitable for which application.

Maintaining the ability for regular users to issue censorship resistant transactions is of course critical

Mable: Actually, my starting point is that the US regulatory authorities may go after them. Of course, the probability of this is not very high.

Vitalik: If this happens, there are two possibilities:

1. DAO will select the sequencer and backup sequencer, and will always move to the new sequencer

2. We use based rollups [EN: Making Sense of Based Rollups]

I think the first one is worth studying. I know some L2 teams have thought about this direction.

The second one is a backup. There may also be other reasons why we think based rollups are better and start using based rollups more often.

The advantage of Ethereum is that we can try several directions at the same time

Mable: What is the difference between the technical roadmap for ETH 3.0 and the goals envisioned during the rollup era? In the 3.0 design announced during Bangkok Devcon last year, was there any consideration of the fact that rollups have not yet provided any real value to the Ethereum mainnet?

Vitalik: There is no such thing as ETH 3.0 right now 😀

Some people would say that Justin Drake’s 5-year plan is it, but that plan is only the consensus layer, not the execution layer, so it is only part of the future of the Ethereum blockchain.

The relationship and balance between L1 and L2 is an execution layer issue. Here is another roadmap: strengthen L1 capabilities (increase gaslimit, add stateless verification (such as Verkle) and other functions, etc.), improve cross-L2 interoperability, improve blobs, etc.

I also think that the question of whether L2 pays enough transaction fees to L1 should not be viewed too short-term. For example:

• Before 4844, everyone's complaints were the opposite: Is L1 sucking the blood of L2?

• Currently, the blob fee for the last 30 days is 500 ETH

• If the blob target is increased from 3 to 128, according to our plan, if the blob gasprice is the same, it will burn 21,333 ETH per month, 256,000 per year.

So the narrative here is prone to change quickly. Now we need to strengthen L1 so that things that should happen in L1 can happen in L1, increase blobs, and then maintain the adaptability of our community.

Mable: You decided to step up again to lead the EF. I believe you must have gone through a great deal of deliberation, and that it wasn’t an easy decision—it’s like a leap of faith, staring into the abyss. I deeply admire that. Would you mind sharing with us the entire thought process behind this decision?

At the same time, I’m curious about your view on “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” My question stems from your conversation with Ameen about the concept of a “proper board.” Before embarking on the correct development path, do you think an organization requires strong leadership to guide and correct its direction?

Vitalik: I think the blockchain community, and the world as a whole, is in a dangerous state. There are many things happening that have no long-term value, or are even malicious, and these things and the people behind them have received a lot of attention.

But we can't just shout against these things and not come up with a better alternative. So our goal should be to do this alternative well and demonstrate that a stable, brighter future is possible.

Here I am talking about both the blockchain community (if memecoin, which dropped 97% in one day, is not our future, then what is?), and a macro-social aspect: many people now think that democracy is impossible and that things can only be done under the leadership of a strong man. But at Devcon, a political scientist told me that one of the reasons he respected Ethereum so much was that we are a truly open and decentralized ecosystem, and we have succeeded at this scale, which gives him hope. So if we can succeed in this way, the positive impact on the world may be huge, and it will give many people a bright example of success that they can follow.

But "decentralization" does not mean "doing nothing". The Ethereum Foundation's philosophy of subtraction does not mean "reducing the foundation to 0", but a way to maintain ecological balance. If there is an imbalance in the ecology in one place (for example, one part of the ecology is too centralized, or there is an important public good that others do not do), we can come to help counterbalance. After solving this problem, the foundation can withdraw from that area. If an imbalance occurs in a new place, we can move resources there, and so on.

In Chinese culture, the way we pursue may be most similar to the thought of Tao Te Ching, but this path requires wisdom and the ability of the foundation to be improved in some areas. It is not a matter of "success by doing nothing". Therefore, in the short term, we need to put more effort into some important pivots.

Mable: I’m not part of Ethereum’s core circle, so I’m not very aware about some of the nuances in the politics. From your perspective, what do you think are some of the main reasons certain OG ETH Maxis have decided to leave the Ethereum community?

When I recorded a podcast with Shuyao, she brought up an interesting point that Ethereum might need to go to zero first before it can rebuild (half joke). In your opinion, at this stage, does Ethereum indeed face a need to reshuffle its existing holders and community members in order to forge its own path forward?

Vitalik: There are many different people with different stories.

For example, many people in the blockchain circle would say 10 years ago that the goal of blockchain is to be a global neutral system, protect personal freedom, and counterbalance government hegemony. Now, if a president issues a memecoin, they will say, wow, this is real world adoption, so good, but why is it happening on other chains? If we can be more friendly to those politicians, it will happen on our chain next time! I personally think that such people have gone astray. Of course, they will say that I am too purely idealistic, unrealistic, etc. Each side has its own story.

Some people would also say that the Ethereum ecosystem is too controlled by OGs and there is not enough space for newcomers. But this criticism is in another direction, and there are different groups making these arguments.

I think there is only one suitable way for us to get out of these predicaments: we need to have some updated stories to explain why Ethereum exists, what the ETH coin does, what L1 and L2 do, etc.? This is no longer the era of infra, but the era of applications, so these stories cannot be abstract "freedom, openness, anti-censorship, solarpunk, public goods, etc.", and some clear application layer answers are needed. In the near future, I plan to support more: info finance (this is also the direction of AI + crypto), privacy protection, high-quality public goods financing methods, and continue to do a good job as the world's open financial platform, which of course must also include real world assets. There are many things here that are valuable to many users at the same time and are in line with the values ​​we have always had. We need to support this direction again, and this can also give new people more opportunities.

Mable: Do you think Ethereum needs a more commercial, company-like style of management at all? Would you say that the current differences between ETH and SOL essentially boil down to efficiency differences arising from distinct organizational structures, as well as divergent goals? What do you think are the goals for Ethereum and Solana?

Vitalik: I think Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, not a company. If Ethereum becomes a company, we will lose most of the meaning of Ethereum. Being a company is the role of a company. In fact, there are many large companies in the Ethereum ecosystem: Consensys, various client teams (Nethermind, Nimbus, etc.), Coinbase, L2 team (including Aztec and Intmax, their privacy technology is very interesting and underestimated by many people)

The best way is to find ways to give these companies more opportunities to realize their strengths, with the foundation playing a coordinating role.

Mable: I’ve noticed that you’ve been paying close attention to the application of zero-knowledge technology. Besides ZK tech's usage in asset trading scenarios, what are some social scenarios where ZK could be introduced to achieve privacy protection?

Vitalik: I am interested in many non financial zk use cases, such as:

• Anti-sybil verification. Many services require you to log in with kyc not because they really want to know who you are, they just want to know that you are not a robot, or if you are banned, you can't reopen your account 100,000 times. To implement this use case, you only need zk proof of personhood, or proof of reputation. In fact, sometimes proof of tokens is also enough, such as anonworld

• Use cryptography to protect privacy in AI applications. ZK may not be the most suitable technology here, but FHE may be. [EN: Fully homomorphic encryption] FHE has made a lot of progress recently. If we can further reduce the overhead of FHE, there may be a chance.

• Wrap any web2 account with zk-snark and use it in web3. zkemail, anon aadhaar, zkpassport, zktls, etc. are good examples

I think this technology has a lot of opportunities to solve many security, governance and other issues in social and other fields by protecting personal freedom and privacy.

Mable: Encouraging more developers to join Ethereum and incentivizing/retaining existing developers (particularly when compared to some newer L1s or even L2s that offer more generous developer incentives) is certainly a more complex challenge for Ethereum. Do you see this as a current priority?

Among the following three areas—accelerating network decentralization, improving scalability, and exploring more application scenarios (apps)—which do you believe is Ethereum’s highest priority right now?

Vitalik: Here we actually need to find a way to solve three problems at the same time:

1. Attract more developers

2. Encourage developers to develop applications that are open source, secure, compliant with public standards, have long-term value, etc.

3. In the process of solving (2), avoid the situation where the ecosystem becomes a closed circle (the phenomenon of "we are aligned because we are good friends of developers")

So I recently said that Ethereum alignment should be a technical game, not a social game.

I want to talk about the robber problem because I think that in terms of decentralization, the most pressing centralization problem is often not L1, but L2, wallet, or application. So the entire ecosystem needs to work together to expand and attract new developers and make progress in these decentralized and trustless aspects.

There are several ways we can help with this:

1. Education, making it easier for developers to understand why blockchain exists, what should be on the chain, what should not be on the chain, what they need to care about in the field of blockchain, etc.

2. If some blockchain-specific technologies are too difficult for application developers, the foundation can do it itself, making it easier for developers to integrate. For example, ZK programming language, A16Z's Helios, etc.

3. Provide developers with clear standards. For example, if you are developing an Ethereum client, there are many tests, and you can run the tests yourself to see if your client can pass. If you are developing L2, there are frameworks such as l2beat stage 1, stage 2, etc. This should also be provided for zk applications, wallets, etc.

Mable: In today’s world, where AI is accelerating technological evolution, you previously mentioned the concept of "d/acc" (a form of “decelerationism” or “defensive accelerationism” in response to accelerationism). From your current perspective, do you think the process of effectively decentralizing technological power is unfolding as you had hoped? Are there any concerns you have regarding potential risks in this area?

Personally, I sometimes feel a bit powerless—because I recognize that a scenario like “Folding Beijing” could be our future. From a humanistic standpoint, I don’t want it to happen, but I feel it’s getting closer and closer to reality.

Vitalik: An important correction needs to be made here: d/acc is not de-acceleration, it is decentralized defensive acceleration

This is important because there are people in this world who support deceleration, degrowth, etc., but I think this direction is wrong. In a peaceful world, it will delay the improvement of important medical care and infrastructure and cause more people to get hurt. In the more dangerous world now, if you don't speed up, you will be eaten by those who are willing to speed up.

Decentralized and defensive technology need to compete with other technologies. If the sword advances rapidly but the shield does not, the world will become more and more dangerous. If centralized technology advances rapidly but decentralized technology does not, the world will become more and more centralized. So we need to counterbalance these trends. Blockchain is part of this story, but only part of it. There is also decentralization outside of blockchain (for example, p2p network), software and hardware security (the "shield" of the digital world), and many things in the biological field, etc.

Mable: A sincere question from a community member:

• Does the Ethereum Foundation’s staffs, including its leadership team, have any kind of KPI/OKR-based performance evaluation system?

• Non-profit organizations often struggle with efficiency issues. Do you think the EF faces such problems?

• If so, how do you address them? Could you explain comprehensively how to speed up Ethereum’s development? Ethereum has been around for a decade, and it only updates once a year—development progress seems a bit slow and in need of a significant acceleration.

Vitalik: The Ethereum Foundation has been going through a lot of internal changes in recent months, so any answer I can give now will be outdated pretty quickly 😂

It might be better to ask again in 6 months.

Mable: How do you see crypto, as an anti-establishment infrastructure, contributing to the realization of “Degen Communism”? [EN: Vitalik wrote about this idea on April fool's day - https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/04/01/dc.html] Do you think the current wave of memecoins—particularly those rapidly launched on Solana—could be considered a form of “beneficial chaos” (a term from your blog) that helps bring about Degen Communism?

I couldn’t find an anonymity option, so I’m just posting this directly. Also, I highly recommend you check out "Disco Elysium"—I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Vitalik: Chaos is not necessarily beneficial or bad, it depends on the situation. The interesting question is, how can we make the "rules of the game" so that the chaos naturally produced by the community has a good effect?

For example, civil wars in countries have bad effects, unless they are to get rid of malicious tyranny. However, market chaos often has good effects, eliminating old and inefficient companies and giving new companies opportunities. However, sometimes the market can also lead to the problems we see in the blockchain community. So this is actually very complicated.

So how can we make better rules?

I think the current memecoin is far from ideal. I wrote this article last year to see if there is a better direction: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/03/29/memecoins.html

Mable: You’re likely aware of Simon de la Rouviere’s “This Artwork is Always on Sale,” which was an experiment based on Harberger tax mechanism (patronage as an asset class). Do you think experiments like this could evolve further in future decentralized social networks? Are there any specific mechanisms you’d like to see tested in the realm of decentralized social network?

Vitalik: Yes, I think decentralized social media is a good opportunity to try out many new mechanisms.

Harberger tax is one example, some others are:

• A mechanism similar to community notes https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html

• Creator payouts, similar to Twitter and YouTube but more fair and transparent. Try retro funding, deep funding, quadratic funding, etc.

• Combining social media and DAO governance

Mable: This question comes from Tako's founder @edisonchen:

Many thanks for participating in the AMA today! I also have a question for you: How do you view the fact that, although we belong to the crypto world, we still heavily rely on centralized social apps like Telegram and Twitter for communication and collaboration? It seems that building decentralized social media and truly encrypted communication tools hasn’t really garnered widespread attention or recognition. So far, do you think their development meets your expectations? And what advice would you offer teams exploring and building in this domain?

Vitalik: This is also a question that I am very concerned about. I have been working hard to move most of my conversations from Telegram to Signal in the past two years. But Signal is not perfect either. Although it is confidential, it is still centralized, has no interoperability, requires a mobile phone number to log in, and the server sees a lot of your metadata, etc.

But it is difficult to make a higher quality messenger. I try Status every year. They try to be completely decentralized. They do a good job, but they still have some reliability issues. In fact, there are various small teams making their own messengers, but they are not united, so it is easy for each one to be not good enough.

I recently started using fileverse to do my various documents. I found that the user experience is good enough, and now many people in the foundation use it. If there is a decentralized, encrypted messenger that can achieve this quality, I will definitely work hard to help the community move to this messenger.

Mable: I've heard from the Milady community about why you chose Milady - but I'm still curious about how you'd explain your recognition / alignment on Milady?

Vitalik: I think milady can attract a lot of people because this Internet community does two things at the same time:

1. Not boring

2. Not malicious

If you look at the mainstream world today, you will find that it is very difficult to achieve both of these conditions at the same time. Milady is one of the most successful examples.

anontako: Are you a communist?

Vitalik: No. And I'm also not a capitalist. Both are 20th century ideologies.

(And they are words that have been stretched and abused to the point of meaninglessness: remember, in the 1990s, Microsoft called Linux "communist": https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/ )

I support freedom, global equality of opportunity, kindness and cooperation, human welfare and progress.

These are timeless principles. The question is how to use the tools we have available to achieve these values in the context of the 21st century. I've written at length about the kinds of mechanisms I personally support, but I definitely do not think that I am the only source of good ideas, I think figuring out the best approach is a shared project of both thinking and also increasingly real world experimentation.

0xdc.eth: Can you systematically explain in detail how to accelerate the development of Ethereum? eth has been around for ten years, and is updated once a year. I feel that the development progress is very slow and needs to be greatly accelerated. eth/acc

Vitalik: Now the main goal is to increase the number of blobs, here are:

• Pectra, increase blob target from 3 to 6

• Fusaka, add PeerDAS, and increase blob target

• Continue to optimize PeerDAS in 2026 and 2027

• Add 2D data availability sampling, and increase blob target

There is also a roadmap to increase the L1 gas limit, but this is more complicated, such as delayed execution, statelessness, etc.

anontako: Today, Vitalik has grown golden claws and silver scales, transforming from a dragon-slaying boy into a dragon.

In the Ethereum mining era, it was a democratic consensus, but now V's management system is a dictatorial and authoritarian management model.

After the transition to POS, the democratic system was changed into the people's congress system. Did you suspect that he joined the party secretly without telling anyone?

Vitalik: PoW can only be democratic in the short term. Because there are always economies of scale, larger miners are more efficient, so it will become more and more centralized over time.

I think the reason why we didn’t have ASIC before PoS is probably because everyone knew we planned to move to PoS, so no one made ASIC. If we declared from the first day that we would always use PoW, ASIC would probably have appeared between 2016 and 2019, unless we kept changing the algorithm every year, but this would also be centralized.

So I think our approach, spending 7 years using PoW for distribution and then moving to PoS, is the best

PoS has its own fairness: if you have 10 times more money, you can produce 10 times more blocks. In ASIC PoW, there are economies of scale, and it is possible that 10 times more money = 11 times more blocks.

Another point is: PoS is not a governance method in Ethereum. Ether holders do not have the right to choose which EIPs to put in the next fork, etc. If we use PoS to make such decisions, it would indeed be too plutocratic.